Liquidated by law enforcement authorities in Europe and the United States, the DarkMarket market specialized in drug trafficking, counterfeit money, stolen credit cards, anonymous SIM cards and malware. This became known on January 26, 2021.

At the time of closing, DarkMarket had 500 thousand users and more than 2.4 thousand suppliers of illegal goods. The archives have preserved data on 320 thousand transactions with a total value of about $ 170 million.

Law enforcement officers arrested the alleged creator of the site.

It turned out to be a 34-year-old Australian citizen. He was detained at the border of Germany and Denmark.

The liquidation of DarkMarket was a side result of a large-scale investigation into the “bulletproof” hosting CyberBunker, whose services were used by The Pirate Bay and WikiLeaks in the past.

Law enforcement officers managed to seize control of the entire hardware infrastructure, including more than two dozen servers physically located on the territory of Moldova and Ukraine.

Europol regularly reports on operations against various markets on the darknet, but not all of them are really successful. For example, at the very end of 2020, Europol announced the liquidation of the Joker’sstash market, but its owner reported that only the external domain was neutralized, and the market itself continues to function without any problems.